Academic papers related to Firebug.

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The funky @entries below are BibTex entries.

Often you can get the BibTex entries by looking up the title in Google then going to the ACM or IEEE sites where the document abstract, title, and bibtex entries are available but not the paper.

Sorry for the lack of formatting, I'll come back and clean up as soon as I can.

Breakpoints

Domain-Specific Language Debuggers

As a specialized debugger, Firebug resembles debuggers for
domain-specific languages\cite{Wu04DomainEclipse}. However, the
breakpoints we introduce here support higher-level graphical and
network abstractions, not higher-level source-code
abstractions. Firebug has domain specific breakpoints but when they
hit, you are in general purpose source code. On the other hand, the
extensive integration of Javascript and HTML/CSS in the Document
Object Model combined with Firebug's integration of debugger views and
the Web page blurs the line. We think it unlikely that debugger
generation techniques\cite{Wu05weavinga} could produce a Firebug-like
user experience.

User Experience and Studies

Debugging and the Experience of Immediacy

Firebug provides good tools to master ``space, both the 2D space of
the Web page and the interface to the network. Our breakpoints help
connect these spatial dimensions to the source code that modifies
them. But breakpoints are intrinsically ``at the wrong time:
developers set them then run the program to hit them at a later
time. This limits the kind of immediacy of debugging advocated by
Ungar et al.\cite{Unger97Immediacy}.

We discuss the design of a software system that helps software engineers (SE's) to perform the task we call just in time comprehension (JITC) of large bodies of source code. We discuss the requirements for such a system and how they were gathered by studying SE's at work. We then analyze our requirements with respect to other tools available to SE's for the JITC task. Next, we walk through system design and the objectoriented analysis process for our system, discussing key design issues. Some issues, such as dealing with multi-part names and conditional compilation are unexpectedly complex. 1 Introduction The goal of our research is to develop tools to help software engineers (SE's) more effectively maintain software. By analyzing the work of SE's, we have come to the conclusion that they spend a considerable portion of their time exploring source code, using a process that we call justin time program comprehension. As a result of our analysis, we have developed a set of requirements..

An Exploratory Study of How Developers Seek, Relate, and Collect ...

Abstract:
Much of software developers' time is spent understanding unfamiliar code. To better understand how developers gain this understanding and how software development environments might be involved, a study was performed in which developers were given an unfamiliar program and asked to work on two debugging tasks and three enhancement tasks for 70 minutes. The study found that developers interleaved three activities. They began by searching for relevant code both manually and using search tools; however, they based their searches on limited and misrepresentative cues in the code, environment, and executing program, often leading to failed searches. When developers found relevant code, they followed its incoming and outgoing dependencies, often returning to it and navigating its other dependencies; while doing so, however, Eclipse's navigational tools caused significant overhead. Developers collected code and other information that they believed would be necessary to edit, duplicate, or otherwise refer to later by encoding it in the interactive state of Eclipse's package explorer, file tabs, and scroll bars. However, developers lost track of relevant code as these interfaces were used for other tasks, and developers were forced to find it again. These issues caused developers to spend, on average, 35 percent of their time performing the mechanics of navigation within and between source files. These observations suggest a new model of program understanding grounded in theories of information foraging and suggest ideas for tools that help developers seek, relate, and collect information in a more effective and explicit manner.

HotWire: a visual debugger for C++

We argue that visualization is essential in a modern debugger. Instead of inserting debug statements throughout the code, it should be possible to easily define visualizations while running the program under control of the debugger, resulting in what might be called "visual printf's". A visualization of a C++ program can provide exciting insights. Bugs that cannot be found that easily with non-visual techniques are now found, just by watching the visualizations. However, the mechanisms to define the visualizations should be easy to understand, easy to apply and cause only minimal overhead to the programmer (who is the end-user of the visual debugger). HotWire is not only equipped with a couple of standard visualizations, but also with a small declarative script language (using constraints) that can be used to define new custom visualizations. This paper addresses user interface aspects of debugging tools. Specifically, the user interface of HotWire, a debugger for C++ and SmallTalk on AIX and OS/2 is described.

Guard: A Relative Debugger

A signifcant amount of software development is evolutionary, involving the modification of already existing programs. To a large extent, the modified programs produce the same results as the original program. This similarity between the original program and the development program is utilized by relative debugging. Relative debugging is a new concept that enables the user to compare the execution of two programs by specifying the expected correspondences between their states. A relative debugger concurrently executes the programs, verifies the correspondences, and reports any differences found. We describe our novel debugger, called Guard, and its relative debugging capabilities. Guard is implemented by using our library of debugging routines, called Dynascope, which provides debugging primitives in heterogeneous networked environments. To demonstrate the capacity of Guard for debugging in heterogeneous environments, we describe an experiment in which the execution of two programs is compared across Internet. The programs are written in different programming languages and executing on different computing platform.

Isolating Cause-Effect Chains from Computer Programs

Consider the execution of a failing program as a sequence of program states. Each state induces the following state, up to the failure. Which variables and values of a program state are relevant for the failure? We show how the Delta Debugging algorithm isolates the relevant variables and values by systematically narrowing the state difference between a passing run and a failing run---by assessing the outcome of altered executions to determine wether a change in the program state makes a difference in the test outcome. Applying Delta Debugging to multiple states of the program automatically reveals the cause-effect chain of the failure---that is, the variables and values that caused the failure.

this paper we present a debugging model, based on dynamic program slicing and execution backtracking techniques, that easily lends itself to automation. This model is based on experience with using these techniques to debug software. We also present a prototype debugging tool, SPYDER, that explicitly supports the proposed model, and with which we are performing further debugging research

Practical Object-Oriented Back-in-Time Debugging

Abstract. Back-in-time debuggers are extremely useful tools for identifying the
causes of bugs. Unfortunately the “omniscient” approaches that try to remember
all previous states are impractical because they consume too much space or they
are far too slow. Several approaches rely on heuristics to limit these penalties, but
they ultimately end up throwing out too much relevant information. In this paper
we propose a practical approach that attempts to keep track of only the relevant
data. In contrast to other approaches, we keep object history information together
with the regular objects in the application memory. Although seemingly counter-
intuitive, this approach has the effect that data not reachable from current appli-
cation objects (and hence, no longer relevant) is garbage collected. We describe
the technical details of our approach, and we present benchmarks that demon-
strate that memory consumption stays within practical bounds. Furthermore, the
performance penalty is significantly less than with other approaches.

This paper describes a novel approach to event-based debugging. The approach is based on a (coarsegrained) dataflow view of events: a high-level event is recognized when an appropriate combination of lower-level events on which it depends has occurred. Event recognition is controlled using familiar programming language constructs. This approach is more flexible and powerful than current ones. It allows arbitrary debugger language commands to be executed when attempting to form higher-level events. It also allows users to specify event recognition in much the same way that they write programs. This paper also describes a prototype, Dalek, that employs the dataflow approach for debugging sequential programs. Dalek demonstrates the feasibility and attractiveness of the dataflow approach. One important motivation for this work is that current sequential debugging tools are inadequate. Dalek contributes toward remedying such inadequacies by providing events and a powerful debugging language

This work addresses the problem of diagnosing configuration errors that cause a system to function incorrectly. For example, a change to the local firewall policy could cause a network-based application to malfunction. Our approach is based on searching across time for the instant the system transitioned into a failed state. Based on this information, a troubleshooter or administrator can deduce the cause of failure by comparing system state before and after the failure. We present the Chronus tool, which automates the task of searching for a failure-inducing state change. Chronus takes as input a user-provided software probe, which differentiates between working and non-working states. Chronus performs “time travel ” by booting a virtual machine off the system’s disk state as it existed at some point in the past. By using binary search, Chronus can find the fault point with effort that grows logarithmically with log size. We demonstrate that Chronus can diagnose a range of common configuration errors for both client-side and server-side applications, and that the performance overhead of the tool is not prohibitive. 1